Update on October Term 2012 and an interim Stat Pack

Posted Fri, February 8th, 2013 3:47 pm by Kedar Bhatia

This is another post in an ongoing series analyzing statistical trends at the Court. For a more complete look at the statistics that we collect on the Court, you can find all of our up-to-date charts and graphs here.

The Court has now finished granting petitions for the October Term 2012, and it is more than halfway finished with oral arguments for the Term. Trends are beginning to emerge in the merits docket, and the Court has followed a remarkably steady pace of opinions. All of this means it is now time to release the first edition of SCOTUSblog’s October Term 2012 Stat Pack. You can download it here.

The Stat Pack reveals several interesting trends, some of which are discussed below.

The Court’s Workload: The Court kept well below its normal pace of grants for much of the Term, but picked up the pace in January to finish near the contemporary norm. The Court has granted 76 petitions for review during OT12, the same number of petitions it had granted at this point last year. From OT03 to OT11, the Court averaged 76.2 petitions granted by the end of January. Notably, the Court is not scheduled to hear oral argument or release a signed merits opinion in any original cases during OT12.

Pace of Opinions: The Court has followed a remarkably consistent pace of opinions during OT12. Save for the first week in January, the Court has released one merits opinion during every available week since early November. Despite this consistent pace, the Court is slightly behind its typical pace of opinions, with only 11 opinions released. The Court had released 21 total merits opinions by this time last Term (16 opinions after oral argument and 5 summary reversals).

Advocates: Through the January Sitting, the Supreme Court has heard oral argument from 77 different advocates in 42 cases. Lawyers from the Office of the Solicitor General have appeared in 36 cases, 86% of all cases argued. Advocates who have appeared at least twice during October Term 2012 have made 49 of 107 total appearances. We have also determined whether each OT12 advocate is an “expert” Supreme Court advocate using the definition created by Richard Lazarus. Expert Supreme Court advocates – those who have argued 5 or more times before the Supreme Court or who work at law firms where lawyers have collectively argued more than 10 times – have made a staggering 78 of 107 total appearances (73%).

Individually, Latham & Watkins partner Gregory Garre leads the private bar with four appearances between October 2012 and January 2013. Jeffrey Fisher, David Frederick, and Tom Goldstein follow with three arguments each. Each of the four non-governmental advocates with three or more arguments is a well-known commodity before the Court; each has argued at least twenty times in his career.

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices will meet for their December 9 conference; our list of "petitions to watch" for that conference is available here.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.